Organizations and consumers increasingly use third-party services to store data. Third-party storage services may provide a number of benefits to customers, including flexibility, low capitalization requirements, add-on services, data sharing, and centralized access to data.
Many third-party storage customers want or need their data to be stored in an encrypted state due to privacy concerns or in order to ensure compliance with internal or external data-protection requirements, such as governmental laws and regulations, partnership agreements with other organizations, etc. As such, many traditional third-party storage services store customer data in an encrypted state.
Some conventional third-party storage services may maintain search indexes (e.g., keyword indexes) that enable a customer to search the customer's encrypted documents. Unfortunately, if these search indexes are not properly secured, they may reveal private data contained in the customer's encrypted documents to other customers, intruders, and/or administrators of the third-party storage service. Accordingly, the instant disclosure identifies and addresses a need for additional and improved systems and methods for searching shared encrypted files on third-party storage systems.